v4.1.4 Scheduled For Release

Continuing with our monthly release schedule, version 4.1.4 is scheduled to be released this Wednesday. Here’s a list of some of the changes you can expect from the update:

Mobile!
The most interesting item scheduled for release this week is a mobile plugin! The mobile plugin will simplify the layout specifically for mobile browsers. All default themes and modules will now have a mobile stylesheet, and the mobile plugin will work with both iPhone and Android phones. NOTE TO THEME DEVELOPERS: You will need to start including a mobile.css file in your themes. Contact us if you would like an sample of that file to include in your themes.

Album
Images can now be flipped and rotated.

Blog
We’ve brought back an often requested feature: users can now upload photos through the TinyMCE editor! Additionally, users can subscribe to a member’s blog.

Video
The embed code for YouTube and Vimeo was updated to support mobile viewing. Additionally, support for YouTube’s short URL (youtu.be) was added. Lastly, admins can now allow members to copy the video embed code.

Forum
We’ve fixed a few bugs in forums, such as spacing issues that occurred when editing, as well as incorporated better BBcode support

Payment
We’ve fixed a Paypal issue with none default currencies

Core
We are now using Mootools 1.2.5, which has made SocialEngine IE9 compatible. Banned words, IPs and emails are now stored in individual tables (ie. engine4_core_bannedemails), and the sitemap now uses the Sitemap protocol (http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php). Lastly, logins are now tracked (under spam & banning settings page).

There are a number of other minor fixes that will be included – as usual, you’ll be able to find the changelog file in the core tar file. If you have any questions or concerns, be sure to let us know!

Is the mobile plugin included free of what is its price?
Also, this sounds really hopefull and like I have said many times, I am so, so, so excited to finally get up and running on V4 from my V3 site. So can you please tell me if the migration script is going to work correctly this time! Please take a small amount of time to focus on that.

Mobile plugin with video viewing! And not restricted by a 3rd party interest (including only their addons). Awesome. Hope you include in future releases a way to add albums directly from their phones.

Suggestions for 4.1.5

4.1.5 – (Widget Creator Tool): Using a simply scripting language (Basically if/end if, for/next, etc) and the variables exposed, let's create our own widgets without the need of PHP expertise. This will make our sites less cookie cutter and lots of customization for our needs.

Once more thank you for your heads up on the release. Glad to see everything on that list, but I was hoping that perhaps you would provide a tentative list of things that you would be working on/expected for next months release.

Simply to give us an idea of where SE is headed and what to get excited for.

Three of the things that top my list:

1. A way to deal with spam
2. trying to fix all the outstanding bugs
3. Optimize code for speed and functionality

@John – thanks for the support! There are already some great spam-fighting tools built-in. Try enabling CAPTCHAs on signup, and/or adding member approval (email activation and/or admin approval) to filter out automated signups. Regarding bugs, we constantly addressing bugs that are reported and releasing fixes for them with every month's scheduled release. Optimization is also underway, and we'll be making some more announcements of upcoming features soon!

Thank you for your continued commitment to excellence. Can I make a tiny suggestion though?

Would it be possible in future to release your updates maybe two months apart instead of every month?

It's just that with a large site that has a lot of plugins, we find that first we have to wait for the 3rd party developers to update their plugins to work with your latest release and then it takes and age to reinstall all their plugins and there are always problems which again, take ages to resolve. We still haven't got everything straightened out following the last release and the next one is upon us already.

The developers also complain that they are spending all their time making new compatible versions of their plugins that will work with your latest release when they could be working on new products.

So a bit more time between releases would help a lot and give you more time to make them even better!

My 4.1.5 suggestion a dedicated page just for links that was posted by all the members on the activity wall with categories and ratings arrange according to date and popularity with tabs of today,yesterday,this week and overall ranking

In addition to my question on how much the mobile plugin will be, do you also have any information on when ALL pages within socialEngine will be drag and drop, this way I can design the user messages page in the column layout that I want and drop in advertisements, along with the blog page, forum, etc?

I truly welcome the great improvement. Day after day SE is striving to be the best out there. I would like to see an improvement in the search capability within the site in the next release.
one plug in that I would like to see is a live streaming plug in where admin can use only. Awesome news when it comes to the mobile plug in. It is nice to know that SE is taking more control of some of the plug ins. I do agree with Katie G. that says the release could be every other month. It is not only good for site admins but for you guys to perfect your releases. Happy developing.

If I make the upgrade will I loose any data I have stored such as ip addresses I have as deny entrance? Also, if I already have a mobile plugin installed do I need to disable it or uninstall ot before I install your mobile plugin?

i would love to see the socialengine team figure out an integration with hip hop php ( opensource ) for future release , avoid php eval() and so on. In our world , every little peice of cpu and memory of our VPS server are vital.

This would allow admins to manage more traffic and result in a more stable/reliable product.

Not withstanding the total lack of instructions on how to upgrade – as well as downloading a 'faulty' groups plugin – the upgrade went seemlessly (as far as I can tell) – which is strange. Maybe SE4 is getting better ??!

I discovered that its important to upgrade the core first and leave the activity plugin till almost last otherwise the installation will throw errors because of missing tables in the database. Pity the makers of SE4 didn't tell us this…

All other systems seem to working except:
1. Cannot see anywhere where admin can set embedding for videos (even though the change log says so…)
2. Cannot for the life of me understand why we must pay for the mobile plugin. What's a social network platform without mobile access. THIS PLUGIN SHOULD BE FREE!
3. The abuse report function still doesn't allow admin to respond to the abuse reporter to let them know you're onto it!
4. Version 4.1.4 runs SLOWER than 4.0.5.p2 – even with compression etc!
5. The package uploader has stopped functioning (have to now upload .tar file in /temporary/archive to get it to work !!!!!
6. Cannot see link for subscribing to Blogs (as outlined in change log)

Future idea, Browse page of albums,etc shows all albums, it should filter like if we have view albums to friends only, it should not be seen in browse page who is not my friend, but it shows, however it doesnot open, he/she will gets an error message, You donot have permissions to view this album. Same for other polls etc plugins.

Next important feature is CUSTOM PRIVACY like facebook, I want to share and ALBUM to only two friends, A Wall POST should be shown to specific friends only

Phrases or ‘single word’ changes are not applied to EN language. For example if I wanted to change 'GROUP' with 'CASES' on the main menu, this is not applied.

Group privacy settings are not limited inside that group, cause all the Photos and Videos uploaded inside ‘Post Something’, are seen by everyone outside the group as well.
We would prefer that all the photos and videos uploaded within a group are seen only by the Group subscribers.

The Blog Editor is not as powerful as the Forum one.

Is it possible to allow the choice of Networks during registration and, at the same time, give the user the possibility to add or remove a network in the future?

Is it possible to add a Photo/Picture Zoom Function?

Some videos uploaded by users lose the aspect ratio during playback.

The administrator should be able to resend the confirmation email to all unconfirmed users (shown on Admin Panel) because of technical problems that have prevented the receipt of the email containing the confirmation link.

I still love SE and very impressed with the software and functionality. I just wish these incremental releases would stop and only either bug fixes or major product gets released in the future. The main selling point for SE is the amount of mod developers out there that can customize your site to meet yours and your users needs. To release minor upgrades every 1.5 months is painstaking, time consuming and, more importantly, too expensive! I have had to go through 3 SE versions in 4 months and spend 100's of manhours to rectify problems with 3rd party developers that I didn't need to go through. In addition, your contracted offshore technical people are not trained enough to resolve even the most simplistic problems and generally give template responses to errors (caused by 3rd party plugins….blah blah blah). PLEASE – this is not a hobby for some of us – this is the creation of a viable business based on your software. Stop with the small updates and help with REAL releases and provide highly trained, American support. Thanks.

Congrats on the new release. I notice that newer versions of the plugins have also been provided. Is there a change log for the plugins or are the newer plugins released for compatibility with the core? I have added additional functionality to some of the earlier plugins and therefore I am at a loss to do decide whether to continue using older (self enhanced) plugins or use the new ones and add functionality to them.

The slow speed of SE4.1.4 needs to be addressed as a matter of URGENCY. SE forums are full of complaints from users who say the number 1 problem with SE is the sloppy way database queries are handled as well as the number of them.

I have all the requirements of SE as well as a high spec server and 4.1.4 can take anywhere between 15-20 seconds to load. This is unacceptable for this type of software.